July 1

So July 1^st is coming, and long time readers of the blog may remember that I usually do a post about Canada Day and my thoughts about it. I usually try to keep it pretty positive, because in general I think there’s nothing wrong with taking a little time to feel good and be happy about good things. However this year, it’s been suggested that maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating Canada Day. Not this year.

Usually on Canada Day we (perhaps uncharacteristically, as a nation) puff ourselves up a bit, talk about how great it is living in Canada, and what a good place we’ve created. Usually we eat a bunch of food and do some fun stuff. Pre-pandemic, I usually ran a race. And it’s a nice summer day. But I think I agree we shouldn’t do that this year, and here’s why.

It hasn’t been a great few weeks, for Canada.

215 (and counting) bodies of Indigenous children were discovered in an unmarked burial on the site of a former residential school. I wrote about that a little bit ago.

There was a deadly Islamophobic terror attack.

And there was a vicious incident of homophobic violence.

That’s just, like, recently. So I don’t feel particularly like throwing my hands in the air and shouting about how wonderful this country is or what an amazing place it is. Look, it’s better than some other places you could name. I genuinely believe there are a lot of good things about it, and the people who live here.

But as much as Canada, and Canadians, are often proud to talk about ourselves as a force for good and positive change in the world, it’s also pretty clear that what we need to do is start pretty close to home. We have a lot of work to do on ourselves. There’s a lot of things that are, frankly, not good about this place, too. There’s a lot of discrimination, a lot of violence, and a lot of hate. There’s a lot of people who are left behind and left vulnerable. Canada’s ideals all sound pretty great, but you don’t have to look very hard to see that we’re well short of them.

And this is not to say that everyone needs to feel bad, or that everyone needs to apologize, or something. Nothing is accomplished by individuals feeling sad, or private citizens saying that they’re sorry. I’m not saying (and I don’t think anyone is saying) that we should spend the day inside with the lights out, moping. On the contrary, this is a time when action is called for. What is needed is for all of us to commit to being active participants in the ongoing struggle to make things better.

To end the genocide of Indigenous people and move towards real reconciliation and reparation.

To create a society that is truly welcoming and safe for each and every kind of person, and where they can thrive.

It’s going to take all of us. The marginalized and oppressed and hurt and disadvantaged cannot and should not do it by themselves. They’ve carried the load long enough, and they need a hand up. Every person can find ways to do that. That’s how we move towards a better future.

Indulge me for a second while I give you a quote from Matt Fraction’s run on Immortal Iron Fist, which I finally got around to reading. It’s from the big fight scene at the end. “We fight as one in spite of our origins, and our histories. We fight against the darkness so that we may again know light … we force the darkness down, inch by inch. And that’s how, one step at a time, the good guys start to win.”

One step at a time. Tiny change by tiny action. We can do it, even if we’re not in a literal kung-fu fight against the forces of Hydra. (Immortal Iron Fist was pretty rad, folks)

So, I think maybe on July 1^st, we should be thinking about how we can do that, and committing ourselves to that, rather than patting ourselves on the back about an aspirational version of Canada that does not and never has existed.

But it can.

Let’s all be a part of that, one step at a time. I would love it if, this time next year, we could be talking about all the ways that we’ve started to win.

Thanks for reading.

Subtract Books, Add Books

I am bad at getting rid of books. I fully acknowledge that I am a book hoarder, which I justify in part because I am also a great re-reader of books, so a lot of the time when I keep a book it’s because I genuinely expect to read it again. On the other hand I also have a lot of books that I haven’t touched in years and honestly do not expect to, thus the very full bookshelves surrounding me.

Some of this is the leftover effect of the time when I thought I would have a career in academia, and kept lots of stuff that I figured would be important reference material for later. It’s still here.

I can’t blame everything on that, though, because the bottom line is that I hate to discard a book. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, at one point I somehow acquired two identical copies of William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome. Same cover, same everything. I still really don’t know how it happened, but the thing is that I kept them both for a really long time. The two Burning Chromes made several moves with me and sat next to each other on many shelves. Finally, only a few years ago, when I had absolutely maxed out shelf capacity, I got rid of one of them. It wasn’t easy.

I mention all this because I’ll be moving later this summer and I’m trying to weed out the bookshelves a bit, of things I do not need and will not read again. It’s still not easy. I have had for a long time now this huge and weighty tome analysing the work of Niccolo Machiavelli called The Machiavellian Moment that was a required text for a course in the distant past. It cost, as I recall, quite a bit and the resale market for used Machiavellian Moments is the next thing to zero and I suppose I thought I might use it for something, and so it moved and moved and moved again.

Today I finally took it off the shelf to get rid of it. Then I put it back. Then I steeled myself, and finally weeded out The Machiavellian Moment, along with a bunch of other stuff. There’s still more to do, but I have to break it up into chunks. Even the ‘easy’ calls, books by authors who I don’t want on my shelves any more, or dire tomes like the Machiavelli one, are hard to get done.

I’m not exactly sure why. Obviously I love reading and I love my collection of books, and so chucking stuff overboard has more weight than hucking out stuff I have no affection for. But it must be said that I am not great at throwing away stuff in general. Mostly I always think I might need it again later, and then I’ll be sorry. I suppose this is especially true for books, that are always good for something.

If, a year from now, I desperately need an expert perspective on Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, I’m going to kick myself.

Anyway, no big crescendo coming here, just … getting rid of books is hard. All of them, even the ones I only read once, are objects that I spent some time with and thought on, and I suppose they’re all part of my familiar surroundings, even the ones that usually stay on the shelves. Change is never comfortable, at least not for me.

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However in many cases it’s good, and in this case weeding out the bookshelves is good both because there will be a bit less to pack and move, but also since it provides room to buy more books! I don’t do a lot of reviews on this thing, mostly because I don’t think I am anywhere near widely-read enough to provide truly informed commentary, but despite that I’m going to make a recommendation of something you might want to add to your own shelf.

Jay Odjick’s new graphic novel The Outsider: Welcome to Newtown recently came out and recently arrived at my place. At the end of the day it showed up, I thought I would just look at the first few pages to get a sense of it. I ended up doing the extremely cliched thing of not being able to put it down and reading the whole thing.

Jay has written a fun post-apocalyptic tale that provides an exciting ride of gunfights, fist fights, and machete fights, and turns out to have a good heart to it as well. I know it’s one that he poured a lot of effort and energy into, and I think that really comes across. I think you’ll be glad if you give The Outsider a shot and add it to the bookshelf at your house.

It’s also a much, much, much better read than The Machiavellian Moment.

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For anyone who looked at last week’s Unknown Plant and thought ‘pansy’, give yourself a prize. A few days later the mystery plant bloomed and looks like this:

It’s a lovely deep purple and I promise not to make another tortured metaphor about coming out of the pandemic, but this plant is a survivor and I like it.

Thanks for reading.

Unknown Plant Encounters

Ok buckle up because this is going to be another odd one.

You may remember that last year, I mentioned the late-season revival of my lobelia plant, thoughts connected to that, and that I was going to try to overwinter it. Well, this I duly did, and … it did not go great, pretty much as various gardening websites had led me to expect. The plant did produce a bunch of seed, but then it died back completely, and although I had put the seed back into the same pot, there was not much in the way of signs of life.

Except for this one small green leafy bit that didn’t look much like lobelia to me but I was prepared to take a shot on it, and when spring came I put the pot back outside in the sun and I’ve been taking care of it. Here’s our current state of affairs.

Friends, that is not a lobelia.

Whatever it is, though, it is about to bloom, or moving towards it, anyway, and it’s a bit of a mystery to me exactly what sort of plant it could be after all this time. Everyone loves a mystery, so of course I have to wait and see what the flower looks like, and perhaps then I can identify it.

I’m reasonably confident it’s not a triffid.

As per usual, I also Have Thoughts about all this. This plant pot has been through a bit – winter, the death of what was there before – but now something else has grown. Different than what was there before, but something that promises to have its own beauty to it, along with the special sauce of being new and unexpected.

I like to hope that may be where we’re headed, as we very gradually start to come out of the worst of the pandemic. We’ve been through a lot. A lot of things that were there before may have gone away, or at least changed a lot, so even as the pandemic loosens its grip, we may find that things will not be the same as they were before. (Historian hat briefly: this is what previous pandemics should lead us to expect) But,

And also, many of us have been shut down in various ways over the past year or so, either because of things we haven’t been able to do, or we haven’t had the energy or been in the right head space due to the pandemic reality. That’s starting to loosen up a bit, and perhaps that means we can get back to doing all those interrupted things, and start to do cool stuff again. Like … whatever this plant is about to do.

I’m starting to feel like I might be in the right place to write some stuff again. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And I’ll keep you updated on the mystery plant.

Important Work

I had another thing I was going to write about this week, about the casting for the Sandman series and how it made particular people lose their minds and what I think that reveals about them, and I don’t know, maybe it would have been a decent blog entry.

But then the bodies of 215 children were discovered on the site of a former residential school in B.C., and it doesn’t seem worth writing about the Sandman cast any more.

Canada’s genocide against First Nations and Inuit people is the ongoing shame of our nation. It is a crime that continues to affect people up to the very moment that I am writing this, and it has many facets and tendrils, but the residential school system must be among the most horrific. It was designed by the Canadian government (no, we can’t blame the British for this one) specifically to eliminate First Nations people and enable the continuing expropriation of their land and resources. It was implemented largely by religious institutions, but (conscience-salving though it might be) we can’t shift all the blame onto them either because, again, the objectives were set by the government. Quite explicitly.

Some people still feel it important to try and defend these things, add qualifiers, ‘yes but’s. I don’t understand those people.

I remember when some of the first court cases brought by survivors started to happen in the 80s and 90s. I remember my first reaction was thinking ‘well, that can’t be right’ because of course that wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in Canada, that Canadians did. I had learned, very much, the comforting national tale of Canada the good and kind. When my history classes had touched on First Nations people (which was not all that often), we learned the version of the story where Indigenous people preferred dealing with the British to the Americans because they got better treatment. There are few things more Canadian than seizing the opportunity to dunk on the United States.

Now of course this was at best partly true, and certainly not the whole or most significant part of the story, and we certainly never got to the part where Sir John A. MacDonald asked for a way to get rid of Indigenous people. I don’t really blame my history teachers, because my guess is they didn’t know much about it either. A lot of the ugly parts of Canada’s history have been very carefully camouflaged under the ‘aw shucks’ national myth.

But the schools were there, and we’ve known a lot of the horrifying details about them for a while now, about the physical and sexual abuse, about the unpaid forced labour, about the poor conditions, and about the deaths of so many of the children. How many? Well that was hard to say, because no-one thought it was important, or maybe not prudent, to actually keep proper track.

So you have things like the bodies of 215 children waiting to be re-discovered.

I’m not the right person to say what can or should be done to try to heal the wounds of all the people hurt and traumatized by everything that Canada has done to Indigenous people. I really don’t know how you can ever reach a point where things are ok, or anything like ok. I believe it must be a long and probably endless process of trying to recognize the truth of what has happened, to listen to what Indigenous people need, and then giving it.

I believe that a minimum starting point is to – as my friend Jay Odjick puts it – treat the site of every residential school like a crime scene, right now, and examine them all to find all the remaining evidence of what happened there. Of course it will cost money, probably a lot of money, but the thing is there always turns out to be money for the things we think are really important. This is really important.

There’s so much work that is really important that urgently needs to be done. I have tried to do what little I can by teaching about these things when I have the chance. I have a lot to learn, but it’s really important to try.

I also take a lot of heart from the fact that – unlike me at that age – many of my students are already aware of all this, and already angry about it. It gives me hope that a really different future is coming.